Leo McKinstry

Leo McKinstry is a British author and journalist, noted for his extensive coverage of British and Irish history and best-selling sporting biographies. Since 2005 he has been a columnist for the Daily Express.

Green policies are mad – no wonder Natalie Bennett dried up, blasts LEO MCKINSTRY

ARTICULACY is an essential requirement for a front-rank politician.

Natalie BennettGETTY

Green Party leader Natalie Bennett had a disastrous interview on LBC radio

Someone who is hopeless at communicating or making an argument has no business at the top of public life.

A nervous, unintelligible representative is about as useful as a surgeon with trembling hands or a scaffolder with a fear of heights.

That is why Green Party leader Natalie Bennett is in the wrong occupation, as she graphically demonstrated this week in a disastrous interview on LBC radio.

Responding to a series of straightforward questions put courteously by veteran host and Sunday Express columnist Nick Ferrari, she descended into embarrassing incoherence.

Deathly periods of silence were punctuated by verbal stumbles and anxious coughs.

Unable to explain how her party would pay for its policy of building 500,000 new subsidised homes, she emerged as economically illiterate and innumerate.

At one stage, as her voice trembled, she appeared to be on the verge of emotional collapse.

This debacle has rightly been described as one of the worst interviews in political history.

Even Bennett later admitted that her performance was “excruciating”.

But she could have done, without the counterproductive support of two other Green figures.

One of them, London Assembly member Baroness Jenny Jones, tried to stop journalists at a subsequent press conference from asking Bennett about the LBC interview, screeching “She’s not going to answer that, no, no, no” at one television correspondent.

Her hectoring behaviour not only further undermined Bennett’s authority but also betrayed a disturbing contempt for free speech.

Just as desperate was the conduct of Caroline Lucas, the Greens’ only MP, who played the feminist victimhood card by claiming that the controversy over the Bennett shambles might have “something to do with her being a woman.”

The implication of Lucas’s remark is that female politicians should be treated more gently than male ones.

Such a stance both makes a mockery of gender equality and is an insult to ambitious political women who rightly want fair, not special, treatment.

On a purely human level, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for the Green leader.

Most people have an anxiety about performing in public, consumed by the terror that our minds will go blank.

Indeed surveys show that, after death, public speaking is our greatest fear.

Having flopped woefully several times in my youth when trying to give speeches, I instinctively understand such concerns, one reason I turn down a lot of media requests.

On the rare occasions that I do accept, I am usually gripped by nerves beforehand.

By coincidence yesterday I did an interview for LBC with Nick Ferrari but, partly because of my usual tension, I made a poor, rather gabbled, contribution to his show.

Her party should remain on the fringe of British politics

But I am not a politician and have no aspirations to public office.

In contrast, Natalie Bennett wants to have a major say in British politics, so she should be prepared to accept forensic scrutiny of her policies and fitness for leadership.

Indeed, the tough media interview is one of the best methods of assessing a politician’s calibre.

Those who wilt under pressure reveal that they are not equipped for heavy responsibilities.

That happened in 2012 to the young Tory Treasury Minister Chloe Smith, when she was torn apart by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.

On a far grander scale, Neil Kinnock demonstrated in 1989 his utter unsuitability for the premiership in a hysterical radio interview with James Naughtie.

Asked about Labour’s economic policy, he launched into a lengthy foul-mouthed rant, the colourful lowlight of which was a pledge that “I’m not going to be bl***y kebbabed”.

Kinnock was always hailed by his supporters as a great orator.

But, with bitter irony, that interview showed he was just a shallow, bad-tempered windbag.

Equally ironic is the fact that Natalie Bennett is a journalist by profession, famous in her workplaces for the noisy stridency of her opinions.

She also has a Master’s Degree in Mass Communications from Leicester University so she is supposedly well-acquainted with the techniques of the modern media.

Yet Bennett was so useless, not because of nerves or inexperience, but because she was trying to put forward crackpot, extremist policies completely alien to the British public.

It was the wild, profligate, immoral absurdity of her party’s plans that made her brain freeze.

Just as Kinnock could not articulate a convincing case for his brand of socialism, so Bennett was literally rendered speechless by her attempt to defend the indefensible.

She leads a party that wants to abolish the monarchy, impose completely open borders, legalise prostitution and drugs possession, sympathise with terrorism, introduce far higher taxes, give more rights to travellers and asylum-seekers, turn football clubs into cooperatives, abolish the defence industry, and force our armed forces to adopt a “non-aggressive stance.”

They do not even believe in Britain’s identity.

“Nationality is inherently racially discriminatory,” says one Green document, adding that the party will work towards the creation of a world where “the concept of a British national is irrelevant and outdated.”

Nor is this just theory.

In Brighton, where the Greens have been in control since 2011, the city has become a byword for misplaced dogma and epic mismanagement.

That sort of nonsense is why Bennett precisely is tongue-tied – and why her party should remain on the fringe of British politics. 

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